


Do You Remember Me?

by Virareve



Category: To All the Boys I've Loved Before Series - Jenny Han, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Future Fic, Getting Back Together, Kitty Song Covey cameos, Peter Kavinksky cameos, Peter and Lara Jean tie the knot, Romance, also I never got around to totally reading ps I still love you, but who's counting, hopefully this doesn't screw too hard with canon Margot and josh, or always and forever Lara jean, sooo..., sort of a mix between the books and movies, takes place a vague twelve years in the future, which is to say that I let kitty be much younger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2020-10-06 21:34:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20513843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Virareve/pseuds/Virareve
Summary: More than a decade ago, Margot broke Josh’s heart. When she revealed to Lara Jean how much she was breaking inside, she went to him for a second chance and was rejected. Now Lara Jean and Peter are getting married, and with their romance on her mind, Margot finds herself reflecting on life, love, and her own pursuit of happiness.





	Do You Remember Me?

** _July_ **

When she’s at her lowest, Margot envied Lara Jean. More specifically, she envied that her sister walked right into a verifiable cliche and Margot was still sifting through murky, murky mud to find her _ someone _. 

She knew it wasn’t true but the little voice in her head liked to whisper that Lara Jean got it easy. She got Mr. Right on the first try. Margot understood that the reality of her own situation clearly: the end of her first relationships was her fault. By her actions, she wouldn’t ever be able to say how things would have run with Josh if she’d let it run their relationship run its course. 

Margot had tried dating since then. She’d experienced a varied mix of short-term flings, a semi-long-term commitment, many spectacularly terrible first dates, and many more boring ones where she felt herself awkwardly scrambling for words to fill the silence. Overall, despite the rare bouts of drama it was an okay experience. Occasionally fun, occasionally crushing, and mostly “meh.” 

But Margot had a secret. One she was too ashamed of to tell Lara Jean or Kitty. 

That somewhere far, far away, buried deep in her mind she still had deep emotional feelings for Josh that she had kept locked and stored away and guarded to never see the light of day. For so long, she told herself it was just the usual byproduct of first love. But when those thoughts resurfaced during a dark moment, she would be visited by a lingering regret the next day. And nearly ten years on, that lingering regret had yet to fade. 

The questions always seeming to cycle over and over again.

If she had trusted their relationship, if she’d been honest with Josh from the beginning, could they have taken a break and gotten back together? 

Would open communication mean they might have still been together now? 

It was a dangerous train of thought. After all, choosing to break up with him was the smart choice, one that even Josh had appreciated in the end. And yet, she wondered, if she hadn’t been so eager to play Ms. Adult, could she have still be in love with him? 

If she had stayed near home, would she have found herself happy with him?

“Margot?” 

Speak of the devil. She sighed. “Hey Josh, wasn’t expecting to see you here.” Like the coward she was, she’d ditched Lara Jean’s wedding reception to wallow in the mistakes of her youth. The champagne tonight had served to make her feel much less celebratory and much more melancholy. Fortunately, the small public park down the street was the perfect place to meet her needs. Supposedly. “Did you get lost on the way home?” she asked. 

Josh might have lived in the opposite direction, but she also saw him throw a few shots down with an overly-excitedly, recently-legal Kitty. Margot, personally, still felt a little heady from the huge tequila shot Kitty pressured her to do in the name of sisterly bonding less than an hour before. 

She heard his steps coming closer and then a slight _ thump _ as he sat on the rubber swing next to hers. “Actually, I was looking for you.”

“And leave your mom without a dance partner?” She joked. Her words fell flat and awkward. She hoped he’d take her hint and leave.

He smirked. “Give my dad a little wine and he can pull out some good moves.” 

Margot’s stomach turned at the perfection of his face and the yearning for him had her insides flopping. “Well, looks like you found me.”

He hummed in agreement. “The ceremony was nice.” He swung himself back and forth lazily, his feet not leaving the ground. “Lara Jean looked beautiful.”

“Yeah,” she answered, feeling a small pang in her stomach, wondering if Josh was contemplating what it would be like to be the groom. If she kept things curt, maybe Josh would get the message and go.

“And your dad’s waterworks…” Josh snorted at the memory. “I thought Peter’s mom was going to lead the charge on that front but, Jesus, talk about a dark horse moment.”

Margot couldn’t help the smile that slipped out when she thought of her dad at the ceremony. Tina Rothschild fortunately had come armed with a box of tissues exclusively for him.

“And poor Tommy,” Josh continued, referencing Kitty’s college boyfriend who took time off from his internship in New York City to go to the wedding, “Kitty’s going to eat him alive. I bet he doesn’t make it past the end of the year.”

She nodded. A smile slipping out before she snatched it back up. 

Josh’s voice softened, “I just can’t believe that after all these years of knowing you guys, I’m actually here at your sister’s wedding. Talk about time flying.”

This time, when she didn’t say anything, Josh noticed.

“Are you ever going to talk to me, Margot?” he asked, “you’ve been like this since...” He looked troubled. 

She pursed her lips and closed her eyes. She was usually so much better at this. She was the queen of controlling her emotions. She wasn’t sure why she was acting like this, acting like Josh was a stranger she didn’t know, an ex she hadn’t talked to since the break up. 

Because that wasn’t true. 

Several years ago, a teenage Kitty had decided to seek out Josh again, missing his presence in her life. He became an older brother figure to her all over again and when she decided she wanted to major in Computer Science, he became her mentor. 

And in time Kitty reintroduced Lara Jean and Peter to Josh and helped the three forge a new camaraderie. One that Lara Jean and Peter greatly enjoyed and loved to talk about. A new friendship that meant Josh became a regular part of their social circle and Peter’s Fantasy Football League (regardless that Josh previously had never been one for football) and involved the couple continually attempting to matchmake their bachelor friend. 

So in _ her _ reality, her and Josh have been _ okay _. Things definitely were never the same, but for the most part they maintained a tentative friendship: an acquaintanceship with capital “H” History. Their sort of relationship was now built on cautious acknowledgements that included the occasional ‘Like’ on a profile photo and the infrequent ‘Congratulations’ on social media life updates. She rarely saw him these days, especially with her picking up a low-paying, but very difficult to obtain, museum position in London after uni. 

Then this week happened. Previously, Margot really thought they were making pretty great strides before the wedding. He had even picked her up from Richmond airport when her family couldn’t, giving them a chance to break the ice and talk to each other on the long ride home. Then with all their run-ins as members of the wedding party, she thought they might come out of this week as actual friends.

Three nights ago at the pub crawl that was combined to be Lara Jean and Peter’s joint bachelorette/bachelor party and Kitty’s twenty-first birthday bash all the progress they made got screwed up.

She hadn’t done anything exceptionally stupid, like sleep with him or have a drunken hook up in a bathroom stall, but there had been a _ moment _. The sort of moment where she thought he might possibly lean down and kiss her and she realized she wouldn’t mind kissing him. Of course, it had been ruined when one of Kitty’s UVa friends had stumbled into them on her way out of the bathroom. 

Margot had been avoiding him since.

“You know, I used to think about what our wedding would look like when we were dating.”

Her brain short-circuited at the non-sequitor. A graceless “um” being the only reply she could manage.

But Josh wasn’t done, “Would you wear a hanbok? Would we be able to get Kitty into one? Would you let Lara Jean and Kitty be bridesmaids or would the two of them duke it out. Or maybe you’d give it to an old friend just to prevent a fight.”

She felt a little dizzy now as Josh went on about this wedding he’d apparently thought out. Only now she filled in the blanks. There would Ms. Rothschild next to her father instead of her long-dead mother, and Peter would be a groomsmen because Margot knew that Josh didn’t have many close guy friends. And she’d wear her mother’s hanbok, the blue and pink of it would gleam brightly in an early summer sunset. 

“I thought of it after we broke up.” Josh’s voice broke into her reverie. “Sometimes...I still think of it now,” he admitted quietly.

“What?” Margot startled, jumping up from the swing. “You can’t just walk over here and start talking like that. Why are you even bringing this up?” she asked, fighting to keep the distress out of her voice. “We were over eight years ago, Josh.”

“No, we’re not Margot.” He got off the swing and followed her as she walked to pick up the clutch she’d abandoned in the grass. “Maybe back then yeah, but now...I’m-” he stuttered for a second, and ran a hand along his face in frustration. He placed a hand gently on the crook of her arm and looked her head on. “Margot, I’m in love with you.”

_ “What?! _ ” _ No _. This couldn’t be right. She glared at him, moving back to increase the space between them. “You know what? You’re drunk. Go home, Josh.” She felt anger seeping in when she heard Josh behind her.

“Gogo.”

“Don’t even start with me.”

“Gogo, will you just listen for god’s sake?”

She spun around, he looked a little shocked when she marched right up to him. She poked him hard in the chest with her right index. _ “You. Don’t. Get. The. Right. _” Each word she punctuated with a hard jab of her finger. “You don’t get the right,” she repeated, “to come waltzing in like all it takes is a simple okay and everything will be fine.”

“Hey,” his hand settled on her bicep and she moved out of his way.

“Stop it,” she said. “I accepted when you told me no when I came back. It hurt. It hurt like hell, but I accepted the consequences. I dumped you and I lost you. It was fair. But to tell me that you still have any ounce of feeling for me after more than a decade?” She stopped, gulped in a big breath of air, and said, “Don’t be so cruel.”

“No.” 

“What?” she practically screeched at him, her body becoming tense and rigid and defensive. 

“I see the way you look at me Gogo,” he interrupted before she could go on another tirade. “I see the way you look at me and I know you still care. I get it, I should have said something when I realized but all the hurt and all the other people I’ve dated have led me back to one thing: you. I wanted you when I was seventeen and I still want you now. I fucked up telling you that breaking up was a good idea, but I thought you were over me. You pretended everything was fine and you still didn’t talk to me for years, Gogo.” She saw his eyes becoming watery and she realized the tears sliding down her own face mean she was crying too. “And next thing I know, Kitty’s yammering on about how the captain of the rugby team was bringing you flowers and taking you out to dinner and how some fucking like twelfth removed cousin of Prince William is trying to charm the fucking socks off you by taking you and your friends to his family’s estate, and I thought it was too late to say anything because I FUCKED UP.”

“Josh…” she said softly. Kindly even. 

“But then you’re here,’ he said, “and I get to see you all the time, in person and I see how you look at me when you think I can’t see you and I know how I feel about you and I realize we don’t have to over Margot. We can still be Margot and Josh. I love you. And I don’t know if you love me now, but I swear you’ll love me again if you give me another chance.”

“Josh,” she tried again, “I don’t know what to say. You might be confused, you might be emotional from all the alcohol Kitty’s been making us drink, it might be because of the romantic atmosphere surrounding the wedding. But I don’t think we’re Lara Jean and Peter.”

He opened his mouth. She stopped him.

“_ But _ maybe what you’re saying is real. And honestly,” she shrugged, “I’d like to think it is. But I’m an adult now and I have to be rational. What happened between us was _ twelve _years ago. That’s nearly half our lives” Josh looked at her, protest in his eyes, so she laid a gentle hand on his chest, looking at him with a plead. “I’ll be home for Christmas, and if I’m still single and there’s no girl in your life, find me then Josh, and maybe we’ll make it work.”

He nodded, immediately walking off and leaving her alone in the park, wondering for a second if that whole conversation really happened.

After that moment in the park, Josh was quick to make himself scarce and a part of Margot felt disappointed, wanting him to sweep in and make a big scene. A larger part of her felt relieved, he had heard her and he’d give her time to think about them. the more rational part of her was happy with this move as she knew that had he done so, she might only think he was caught in the moment. Even without the physical presence in her life, he found ways to let her know he was thinking of her. Two days after the wedding it was a bouquet of flowers left addressed to her on the doorstep. Another day it was her favorite milkshake from the diner that her father and mother, Lara Jean and Peter, and once her and Josh had loved to frequent. Her final day it was Peter himself with his jock smirk on his face handing her tupperware of kimbap, her favorite korean snack and his own commentary of “There may be hope for Sanderson yet.”

* * *

** _December_ **

Margot liked the cold. Loved it even. But as she stupidly stood in the departure lane of Richmond airport waiting for Lara Jean to hurry the hell up from whatever traffic she texted her to let her know she was stuck in, Margot was a frozen icicle. 

“Pick up your phone,” she growled into her phone as she heard Lara Jean turn her to voicemail for the fifth time in the last two minutes. 

“Did someone call for an uber?” a voice interrupted her increasingly irritated mental tirade. 

“Josh?” Her eyes blinked rapidly, trying to understand the apparition right in front of her. Last he told her in a text, he wouldn’t be able to come down from his work offices right away and would miss the first week of her being back. “You’re here.” Margot cringed. God she sounded like such an idiot.

“I am,” he agreed and sidled up to her. Her gently tugged her heavy roller luggage from her frozen hands. “God, you look like you’re freezing.” He reached out and zipped off his jacket.

“Josh,” she tried, looking for her voice, still unsure with what to start with. He was here. He was taking her home. And now he was settling his jacket on her. He was looking at her. His eyes were shining. “Um.”

He laughed.

“Margot Song-Covey speechless? Never thought I’d see the day.” He took care wrapping her in his sweater. 

“Is this what I think it means?” she said instead.

Josh stopped, smiling. “Alright so I have like a two minute speech planned and I was gonna wait until we got to the car but this seems like a good moment so you good if I just go for it?”

Margot blinked. She nodded.

“I get why you made me wait. You wanted to know that I was serious about us but I don’t need anymore time to think about something I’ve known for years. The five hour car ride from New York to here was enough. And the unfairness of watching you look so beautiful at the wedding brunch and being too afraid to spook you off. I’ve had to deal with my coworkers knowing I was mooning about _ someone _ and trying to give me relationship advice for months. I love you Margot Covey so you need to hear me out.

“I feel like I’m still going to say this wrong, but we needed to break up, the people we are now are not the people we were in high school. The me in high school loved Margot Song Covey like no other, but the me now wouldn’t want any other version except the one standing right here. The love I felt for you in the past, I don’t think we can ever get that back. We’re different people now. But that week, spending time with you, I fell and I’ve fallen in love with you all over again. You know if there was anything I could change about this weekend, I’d wish I’d gotten the balls to kiss you that night at the bar. Even Kavinsky saw it and he was on my case about missing my shot at getting the girl. And,” he grimaced, “you know it’s bad when Peter-_ fucking _-Kavinsky is giving you his advice and his blessing at the same ti- mmph!”

She figured then his speech was turning into rambling and she’d gotten the main gist.

Fortunately, Josh seemed to agree with her current change in direction and enthusiastically reciprocated. 

So maybe she wasn’t ever going to be Lara Jean who swooned at every single romantic gesture. And maybe she would never be Kitty who was constantly facing life so stalwartly head on. She was Margot. She has always been careful with her heart. But even she, the paragon of logic among her sisters, found that she was not immune to every single romantic gesture. And even though she wasn’t Lara Jean or Kitty, she still shared the best bits with them.

Josh was breathing hard after she let him go from her kiss. She grinned. 

“Finally!” someone shouted. Margot turned, mortified to find Kitty and Peter fist-bumping a little ways away.

Margot shot them a confused look. Peter shrugged, “Heard about Sanderson and LJ’s team up. Kitty and I couldn't miss Sanderson looking like a dweeb for the ages.”

“Kavinsky what are you doing here,” Josh growled, the same time Kitty waved around her phone. 

“Don’t worry, guys! I got a video for everyone at home.”

The two men started bickering. Margot hid her face in his shoulder silently until he felt the quakes of her laughs echoing against his chest. Josh stopped and looked down at her fondly.

Margot looked up at him. “Let’s go home?”

He kissed her temple. “Let’s.”

  


**Author's Note:**

> Honestly, if you made it to the end thank you. This isn't my best. It's choppy and unedited(which is to say I've rewrote and deleted portions of this over and over and over again), but it's been sitting in my draft folder for the more than a year. I'm nearly sick of it and the words have become almost alien I've read the text so often. And yet, I also love this story immensely and am very attached. I hope that one day I might come back to clean this up, make the work a little more cohesive, but until then...Chau!  
-Vira


End file.
